Although I want to be peaceful with other species, I am not too keen on having relations with a species that is willing to enslave me for no benefit in return. And no relations with any species that wants to kill me. Or eat me. Or both.

One the one hand, I agree with you. However, on the other – you’ve pretty much largely ruled out humanity itself, if you require 100% compliance with the ‘no slaving and no eating of others’ rule.

And by the by – we also don’t know if the Miesti who’ve crash-landed on alter-earth are ‘good guys’ or ‘bad guys’, in the context of their own species. It may be telling that apparently none of their own kind has come looking for them, and they’ve given no indication that they think that’s likely. There’s plenty of reasons that might be, but surely one of those reasons could be that they’re not really missed.

ie, Their callousness towards other sapients may be a matter of the personalities of the individual Miesti we’ve met, and not necessarily the default for their species as a whole.

Let’s not forget, some of the Orehu believe that the Miesti somehow caused the war while others think that the war simply made their planet vulnerable to invasion. I suppose it’s possible that the disruption caused by the Miesti could have triggered events which led to the war. And even if the Miesti did somehow trigger the war, it could have been inadvertent, a side-effect of them trying to get people to help them get home.

Now that we know that the Miesti ship crashlanded, does that rule out the whole “invaders” idea and make them stranded explorers? Or are they actually invaders whose ship happened to crashland?

Aria’s prejudices are really showing on this page. The word ‘symbionts’ does not mean ‘slaves’, so how come she’s so quick to characterize the alien’s relationship with another alien race she knows absolutely nothing about in the most negative terms possible? The Miesti had differing opinions about just how carefully they should treat the Orehu, in a way that implied at least some of them did not see the Orehu as their property.

Well, it’s unclear at this point just how much Aria was seeing/feeling/groking while in that deep trance on page 265. It’s possible that she was able to observe the behaviour and bearing of the ‘symbionts’ with a perspective removed somewhat from that of the Miesti whom she was getting the memory/visualization from.

If so, she might have been able to determine that these creatures were otherwise self-concious and self-motivated, and were controlled by the Miesti to a degree that we, as modern humans, recognize as ‘slavery’ (ie coerced control of a full sapient), rather than ‘symbiosis’ (ie mutualism, typically voluntary in self-aware participants).

tl;dr – Aria could have understood the Miesti so well that she recognized a euphemism when she heard it.

I’m still of the mind that the Miesti don’t actually acknowledge humans as independent sentients, fully capable of independent thought. Or at least didn’t even consider the possibility before Aria showed signs of understanding them. At least one of the ones we’ve seen may be receptive to the idea, but another probably doesn’t care at all. The third one we’ve seen so far is a bit harder to read, though, and seemed far more like a leader-type, more concerned with the other two Miesti stopping their arguing over morality and getting things done.

Well, admittedly the implication is the ‘Rautani’ are actually quite happy to help them, especially since it means they have an easier life than the Orehu.

In addition, there’s a topic that came up in earlier comment section discussions about whether the Miesti actually perceive humans as anything even remotely like sentient equals. As far as I could tell, they reacted to Aria understanding them as if we suddenly discovered a horse or ox responding intelligently to what we were saying.

Of course, this all doesn’t necessarily excuse their ‘using’ humans not unlike beasts of burden, but maybe if they were made to look at us as equals, and the communication barrier was broken down through Aria… maybe the relationship between the Rautani and the Miesti could become far more cooperative, instead of manipulative and just conveniently beneficial for both.

This is what happens when you deal with ‘Starfish Aliens’ and ‘Blue and Orange Morality’. Just because our standards of morality say the Miesti are evil, despicable creatures for making the Rautani dance like puppets on a string doesn’t mean they don’t see things the same way. If they come to acknowledge humans as potential equals and are unrepentant, then by all means down with the Miesti… but from their side, they seem to be just stranded spacefarers making use of what they think are some other sentient race’s discarded or lost ‘tools’, and not sentients in their own right.

“And now, since I have become one of their slaves, it is time for all of you to die and for me to bring the Galaxion back to them.”
“Wait, what?”
“MUAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!”
*next 100 pages are Aria on murderous rampage*

After followin Galaxion for a while now, the time has come to say thanks: Thank you so much for sharing your comic with us. I love the plot, the characters are well written and so are the dialogues. Your art is beautiful, too. It looks like you are influenced by american and european comics with a little bit of japanese, which gives your art a nice old-school touch (the plot helps there too). But then again, I don’t know nothing about art. Anyway, I like the result and it does not really matter if I guessed right, I’ll surely stick around.
Keep up the good work.
Greetings from Switzerland